The population of Monmouthshire around 1640 is at least as difficult to compute as that of adjacent English and Welsh shires. The absence of evidence that can lend itself to any kind of statistical scrutiny is striking, but a highly tentative estimate would be that the county might have totalled upwards of 27,000 people. B. Jones, C. Thomas, M. Gray, ‘Population’, Gwent Co. Hist. iii.
‘This county hath for its eastern bounds, Lincolnshire, from which for a good distance it is severed by the River Trent; for its southern, Leicestershire; for its western, the counties of Derby and York; and for its northern also Yorkshire’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 183. The county comprised two main regions – the fertile arable lands of the southern and eastern parts, watered by the Trent and its tributaries; and the western part, dominated by Sherwood Forest with its largely pastoral economy. Blome, Britannia, 183; Wood, Notts.
Bedfordshire was a small county dominated by more than its fair share of major aristocratic families. The St Johns of Bletso, whose head held the earldom of Bolingbroke, had long ranked as the first among equals, although with the 1st earl out of favour at court, it was Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Cleveland, who held the lord lieutenancy in 1640. The Russells of Woburn, represented by Francis Russell, 4th earl of Bedford, were far less influential in the county in this period than they had once been and would be again.
Until the re-organisation of local government in the 1970s, Yorkshire’s three main administrative units – the East, North and West Ridings – formed England’s largest county, covering about an eighth of the entire country. D. Hey, Yorks.
Northumberland was described in 1673 as ‘a county of a sharp and piercing air and much troubled with pinching frosts, boisterous winds and deep snows in the winter … It is a country but thinly inhabited, which is occasioned through its near neighbourhood to Scotland and its barrenness, being for the most part exceeding rough, hilly and very hard to be manured’. R. Blome, Britannia (1673), 179. The majority of the county’s inhabitants eked out a living as small-scale livestock and arable farmers.
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